Being innovative doesn’t necessarily refer to product innovation only. You can also be innovative in ways how you improve your business based on marketing performance data.
Sportswear innovator Odlo was founded in Oslo, Norway in 1946, and is focused on developing high-quality performance wear for athletes. As the inventor of functional sports fabric, Odlo believes in the mantra “always be one step ahead”. That is also one of the reasons why they are so focused on data-driven ideas, leading them on the way forward.
In the latest Adverity Webinar, our Christina Schlesinger and Bruno Kofler are talking to Clarissa Amrein, Online Performance Marketing Manager at Odlo International, who reveals how improvements in the area of data and analytics helped this company to get ahead of the competition.
Wrestling with Data Complexity
Odlo’s products are available in over 8,000 shops across the world, as well as online across 10 European countries and the US market. Having evolved from “brick-and-mortar” retailing over 75 years, they have been building up a digital business that incorporates extensive eCommerce and social media marketing, so they needed to consolidate and automate their marketing reporting.
In order to achieve ambitious goals, the team faced a number of initial challenges. Clarissa explains that, like many other companies, Odlo’s infrastructure is complex, because it encompasses physical and online stores, as well as a wide network of distributors. They had rather a siloed marketing tool landscape, and this made life difficult for the marketing team. Collecting, processing and analyzing data was complex and time-consuming, and was based largely on manipulating Excel spreadsheets. It’s a story familiar to many marketers, especially in the eCommerce industry.
So, it wasn’t straightforward to identify the right marketing mix and efficiently steer the allocated budget. Consequently, the company lacked sufficient control over its daily marketing spend. Operating in 11 markets, the team at Odlo needed to deal with huge volumes of data, says Clarissa, and were expecting to handle even bigger data volumes moving forward. It was clear that the company needed a consolidated data hub, and new ways how to enhance its analytics stack.
Finding the Right Marketing Mix
“Why was it so hard to find the right marketing mix?” Christina asks. Clarissa explains that the data itself wasn’t the problem: it was available, but it was fragmented in all the different platforms of various providers. Odlo lacked a holistic overview of marketing performance across all channels, and it was hard to know which campaign performed well in the overall customer journey. Plus, every channel tried to showcase the numbers in their favor, which didn’t help in an unbiased channel efficiency analysis.
They also found it hard to match transactional data with marketing data, and this was the main driver to understand the customer journey and the purchase funnel in more detail, and be able to measure the ROI of marketing campaigns.
Getting Ahead of the Competition
“The sportswear market is very competitive, and you can’t afford not to look at your data. By looking at data and deriving actions out of it, you will be able to stay ahead of your competitors”, explains Clarissa. The aim was to significantly reduce the complexity of the marketing tool landscape and consolidate all siloed data into one source; that would give the company the competitive edge it needed.
This consolidation would enable the business to see emerging trends more easily, put customers more in the center of attention, understand and optimize the customer journey, and gain accurate daily performance monitoring. And, as a result, the business would steer and allocate its ad budget more efficiently, spending it where the highest return was expected. After evaluating available options, Odlo turned to Adverity for assistance in this process.
Reaching New Heights
The results of adopting the Adverity platform to consolidate all available data and gain insights from it have been profound, says Clarissa. Manual work time on data preparation has been reduced by a third, process improvements have brought a significant increase in data accuracy, and data management automation has accelerated daily operations by 60%. And this came from integrating, automating and harmonizing all marketing data sources. “We just have to click a single button every morning and we see the updated dashboards with the relevant KPIs,” Clarissa comments.
But the story doesn’t end there. As well as marketing data efficiencies, the company has gained the ability to make smart, data-driven decisions across other business functions, says Clarissa. As a result, Odlo expects to stay one step ahead of the competition and move forward in great strength.
To hear the full details of Odlo’s data transformation story, watch the ENTIRE webinar
